NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

Judge slams privacy advocate

By STEPHEN BRAUN
and KIMBERLY DOZIER
the Associated Press

Published: January 15, 2014;Last modified: January 15, 2014 05:00AM

WASHINGTON — The U.S. judiciary told Congress on Tuesday it opposes the idea of having an independent privacy advocate on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, while members of Congress lauded the idea at a Capitol Hill hearing.

Speaking for the entire U.S. judiciary, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee saying that appointing an independent advocate to the secret surveillance court is unnecessary and possibly counterproductive, and he slammed other key reforms as adding too heavy a caseload to the secret court’s work.

Bates said opening the proceeding to an advocate for privacy in general — who would never meet the suspect or be able to defend the charges against him — wouldn’t create the kind of back and forth seen in open criminal or civil court proceedings.

“Given the nature of FISA proceedings, the participation of an advocate would neither create a truly adversarial process nor constructively assist the courts in assessing the facts,” he wrote.

In another revelation about NSA activities, The New York Times reported that the agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world — but not in the United States — that allows the U.S. to conduct surveillance on those machines.

The NSA calls the effort an “active defense” and has used the technology to monitor units of the Chinese Army, the Russian military, drug cartels, trade institutions inside the European Union, and sometime U.S. partners against terrorism like Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan.